I am a thorn: beneath the nail

Disband the canon. Appraise the things you were told have significance. Read for yourself.

Poetry does not begin with the Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis. It begins, says Robert Graves in The White Goddess, with the Song of Amergin, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet.

The variation of the poem you posted is very beautiful, but bares scant resemblance to the original. It was so divergent, in fact, that Hilda Ellis Davidson (a scholar of poetry) remarked that Graves had “misled many innocent readers with his eloquent but deceptive statements about a nebulous goddess in early Celtic literature.”

Translations, especially in poetry, rarely map linguistically to original works. To do so neglects the poetry in the poem. Do you think, in his essay, Graves was looking to uncover things about poetry’s magic rather than the historical interpretation of myth?

Yes. Graves thought poetic inspiration was a valid historical method. As veracity is concerned, it is not. The extremity of his changes to the poem (ie. new lines added in; old ones moved around; certain consonants of the Ogham alphabet dropped) are such that it shouldn’t be presented as a historical reconstruction, but rather as a work inspired by the original song of Amergin. And yet Graves provides neither the original, nor any other translation (leading many naturally to believe his work is the original).

“Disband the canon.” That’s great! One of the things that baffled me when studying English Lit was the arbitrariness of the literary canon. I was able to open up my library to so many new writers after realizing that I had been limiting myself to books that some anonymous source once said was great. My intellectual life is definitely richer for that lesson.